Saturday, January 26, 2013

A Recent Imperial Woodpecker Sighting?

We had been driving through the high country of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental all day, but our progress was glacially slow. Most of the roads in the mountains are so poor, it takes hours to go just twenty miles, bumping and lurching endlessly with top speeds of only three or four miles per hour. We finally reached a small village in a high valley surrounded by pine-clad mountains. Pines were scattered throughout the village, with one even growing right through the roof of an empty cabin. The ground was still covered by several inches of snow a week after a powerful storm had swept through the area.

(Photo by Tim Gallagher)

We stopped at the first house we came to and knocked on the door. A man in his sixties named Pedro came outside to speak with us. He was staggering drunk but seemed eager to help. We showed him a color illustration depicting four species of Mexican woodpeckers. He instantly picked out the Imperial and launched into a story about riding on a high, pine-covered mesa with his son, Miguel, just three years earlier and seeing one of the birds clinging to the trunk of a large pine. He told us they had never seen one before and Miguel even wondered if it might be some kind of strange mountain grouse. Pedro immediately drew his pistol and shot the bird, injuring it, and quickly threw a blanket over it as it squawked loudly.

The two men had brought lunch with them, he said, and they decided to rest awhile and eat there. A short time later, Miguel stood up and went to check on the bird. The instant he lifted the edge of the blanket, the hugh black-and-white bird burst out and flew away. Apparently, it had only been stunned.

I didn't know what to make of his story. Of course, Pedro was completely intoxicated, and yet the tale he told had some interesting elements and would have been difficult to fake, drunk or sober.

Two feet in length, with the deepest black plumage and brilliant, snow-white flight feathers that showed as a white shield on its lower back, the Imperial Woodpecker lived only in the high country of northwestern Mexico. The last documented sighting of the species took place in 1956, and many scientists have already written the bird's epitaph. But stories persist of lone Imperial Woodpeckers flying yet over the most remote pine forests of the Sierra Madre.

I began searching for these birds about ten years ago and interviewing people who remembered seeing them. It was tough. The mountains have become a major center of drug growing where you often encounter AK-47-toting drug traffickers and other dangerous people.

I'll be posting photos and stories of people I met in my travels through the Sierra. Watch for Imperial Dreams, which went on sale on April 16, 2013, in both hard-cover and electronic editions.